Economic Principles

At a time when many economists were warming to the notion of central planning, Fetter worked to present general economic forces at work in all times and all places. It was the great American economic treatise, and it still holds up after all these years.

Description

Frank A. Fetter was a leading American follower of Carl Menger and the early Austrians. He was the first economist to develop a complete statement of the pure time preference theory of interest, and he revolutionized the theory of rent which had been developed by David Ricardo and the classical economists and was still accepted by economists 100 years later.

Both Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard were heavily influenced by Fetter's writings. Economic Principles is the culmination of Fetter's work and provides a complete and systematic exposition of economic theory based on the Austrian subjective-value approach. Murray Rothbard mentioned it as one of the great economics treatises written before the First World War.